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Needed: A 'Faithful' Warrior Code for America Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com Book Review: "The Faith of the American Soldier," by Stephen Mansfield:(Penguin, 198 pages)
From its title you might think that this is a book of touching anecdotes about the faith of individual members of the U.S. military and you'd be wrong. The Faith of the American Soldier is far more than that.
In what is perhaps the most important book written about the war in Iraq, Stephen Mansfield raises vitally important questions about who and what we are as individuals and as a nation. Are we, a nation where more than some 80 percent of the people believe in God, prepared to act as believers?
If we are, Mansfield argues that both the U.S. military and, by implication, the nation as a whole need to adopt a warrior code rooted in religious principles. [Editor's Note: Find out more about 'The Faith of the American Soldier' Click Here Now!]
Time and again, throughout the book, Mansfield delves into history to find the roots of warrior codes, beginning with the prologue "The Vigil at Arms" - in which he reveals what a candidate for knighthood had to endure in the hours before being admitted to what was then the holy order of knighthood.
"For no less than 10 hours, he prayed the prayers of devotion and ran his heart over each tool of his trade: His sword, his mace, his lance, his gauntlet, perhaps even his saddle and the standard of his king. And he waited for God to receive him. And for the words that would form his call; for the grace to conquer his passions; for the boldness befitting his charge."
As a knight he would live by a sacred warrior code. Writes Mansfield: "A nation's warrior code is an extension of its soul. The embodiment of its highest ideals. There can be few more noble tasks than to understand that code and to honor it as the distilled greatness of a people."
Story Continues Below In a searing example of the need the warrior feels for reassurance that he is fulfilling the demands of his religious faith and his warrior duty, he tells the story of a deeply religious Christian, Marine Lance Cpl. James Gault, whose faith in one shattering moment was shaken to its roots.
With his platoon suddenly under fire from an insurgent armed with an AK-47 submachine gun, Gault spotted the man posted on a rooftop. He raised his .50 caliber machine gun, took aim, and pressed the trigger, and was stunned by what happened next. "The fierce barrage of the .50 caliber cut the man in half, almost exactly at the waist. The Kalashnikov fell from his hands to the street three stories below. Then as Gault watched in shock the man's torso tilted forward, left his lower half and fell to the street as well, not far from where Gault crouched in his vehicle. The man's legs and midsection still stood upright on the roof, just as they had when he was alive."
For two days, the grisly scene replayed itself over and over again in Gault's mind. He had killed before and would kill again, but he agonized over the memory. More than anything else, as a devout Christian who could trace the very reason for his becoming a Marine to his religious belief, he needs to know that what he had done was in line with his beliefs. A warrior code would have given him the answer he sought.
This need for religious faith permeates the military. Stories like this, Mansfield writes, "press questions of faith into the lives of those who fight them. It as been so throughout history. From the moment nations commit themselves to armed conflict until the last shot is fired, wars move men to strengthen their grasp on the invisible realities that define their lives - and in a way that is unmatched by any other human endeavor, This is a story that is seldom told in our secular age, but is among the most inspiring and instructive sagas the history of men at arms has to offer."
The book, the result of the author's travels to Iraq, stateside bases and dozens of interviews with the combatants, and an extensive excursion into history, centers on two themes the conflict between that nation's traditional religious faith and its current secularism and the men of women of today's armed forces who he describes as the "Millennials," the seed of the secularized baby-boom generation.
Described by some as "mocking pessimists" and "a uniformed slacker who knew little of the world and less of his own country's meaning, the Millennials in today's armed forces have proved to be idealistic, religious, and "better informed about his world than any generation that has been called upon to fight its nation's wars."
Mansfield quotes then-Major Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who, speaking of the men and women who fought in the first Gulf War operation remarked "we had the most religious Army since [Robert E. Lee's} the Army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War."
The author describes the Millennials faith, however, as that one of spiritual seekers of the non-traditional variety. Rather than adherents of traditional organized religion, theirs tends to be a personal faith yet a yearning for a more defined faith. To them, he writes "Religion on the battlefield has to work,' has to prove its worth in results."
He concludes "the presence of Millennials on the battlefield, then, means the rise of a religious free market, a crashing world of faith experimentation that not only says much about the future condition of religion in the world."
Mansfield devotes a lot of attention to the Chaplaincy. He pays homage to those who serve in that capacity, tracing the institution back to the eighth century, and following it through history to the present. He discusses at length the challenge chaplains face when working within the anti-religious culture foisted on their institution by official edicts purporting to defend the nebulous concept of separation of church and state in a manner never contemplated by the men who wrote the Constitution.
"The founding generation intertwined faith and government though never the institutional church and government in a way that would spin the mind of those seeking a radical separation of church and state today," he wrote. "Congress called for days of prayer and fasting, printed Bibles, funded Christian missionaries to the Indians, appointed congressional chaplains and referenced faith in its political debates, all without thought that this might be a violation of the law."
Calling the men and women of the armed forces "my heroes" he lists the four elements of the warrior code: "the commitment to wage only just wars, the commitment to justice in the conduct of war, the creation of a holy and historic profession of arms, and the art of serving that profession with an artillery of words. Such a code he writes, is desperately needed by the Millennial generation serving America overseas today."
As noble as they have proved to be, he complains they have been given no code, no moral or spiritual framing for the profession they now find themselves in or the war they now face death to win. They deserve better.
He adds that the consequences of the lack of a warrior code are dire: "Without a warrior code that is mystical, ethical, historic or social, they will fashion individual codes of their own from the informal religions they already hold. Neither they nor the nation will be well-served by this. The danger will not be an absence of a code. It will be a code fashioned by vengeance and rage in the heat of battle, and it will only produce more My Lai massacres and more Abu Ghraib prison scandals, as we shall now see." [Editor's Note: Find out more about 'The Faith of the American Soldier' Click Here Now!]
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